Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

. . . on Work 
If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, if the shuttle 
could weave, and the pick touch the lyre, without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not need 
servants, nor masters slaves. 
—A
RISTOTLE
Before the invention of writing, almost every insight was happening for the first time (at least to the 
knowledge of the small groups of humans involved). When you are at the beginning, everything is new. In 
our era, almost everything we do in the arts is done with awareness of what has been done before and before. 
In the early post-human era, things will be new again because anything that requires greater than human 
ability has not already been done by Homer or da Vinci or Shakespeare. 
—V
ERNOR 
V
INGE
59
Now part of [my consciousness] lives on the Internet and seems to stay there all the time....A student may 
have a textbook open. The television is on with the sound off....They've got music on headphones … there's a 
homework window, along with e-mail and instant messaging…. One multi-tasking student prefers the online 
world to the face-to-face world. "Real life," he said, "is just one more window." 
—C
HRISTINE 
B
OESE
,
REPORTING ON FINDINGS BY 
MIT
PROFESSOR 
S
HERRY 
T
URKLE
60
In 1651 Thomas Hobbes described "the life of man" as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
61
This was a fair 
assessment of life at the time, but we have largely overcome this harsh characterization through technological 
advances, at least in the developed world. Even in underdeveloped nations life expectancy lags only slightly behind. 
Technology typically starts out with unaffordable products that don't work very well, followed by expensive versions 

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that work a bit better, and then by inexpensive products that work reasonably well. Finally the technology becomes 
highly effective, ubiquitous, and almost free. Radio and television followed this pattern, as did the cell phone. 
Contemporary Web access is at the inexpensive-and-working-reasonably-well stage. 
Today the delay between early and late adoption is about a decade, but in keeping with the doubling of the 
paradigm-shift rate every decade, this delay will be only about five years in the middle of the second decade and only 
a couple of years in the mid-2020s. Given the enormous wealth-creation potential of GNR technologies, we will see 
the undercIass largely disappear over the next two to three decades (see the discussions of the 2004 World Bank report 
in chapters 2 and 9). These developments are likely to be met, however, with increasing fundamentalist and Luddite 
reaction to the accelerating pace of change. 
With the advent of MNT-based manufacturing, the cost of making any physical product will be reduced to pennies 
per pound, plus the cost of the information guiding the process, with the latter representing the true value. We are 
already not that far from this reality; software-based processes guide every step of manufacturing today, from design 
and materials procurement to assembly in automated factories. The portion of a manufactured product's cost 
attributable to the information processes used in its creation varies from one category of product to another but is 
increasing across the board, rapidly approaching 100 percent. By the late 2020s the value of virtually all products—
clothes, food, energy, and of course electronics—will be almost entirely in their information. As is the case today, 
proprietary and open-source versions of every type of product and service will coexist.